


Studied, in Blue

by worldaccordingtofangirls



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Realism, Oneshot, Slow Burn, long time no see sherlock fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-12 20:28:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9089512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldaccordingtofangirls/pseuds/worldaccordingtofangirls
Summary: In a world where feelings show up as colors on people’s skin, it is a fact that John Watson is depressed (pale) beyond recovery, and Sherlock Holmes is incapable of feeling anything (blank) at all.    That’s the thing about facts, though. They never quite tell the whole story.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **READ PLEASE!** tw: suicidal ideation, war/case-related violence, drug use, vomiting, blood, really very vague sex stuff. the explicit rating is more for the violence and mental health stuff than the sex, sorry kids.
> 
> to elaborate: this work deals with john’s suicidal ideation in a fairly in-depth way, albeit often through metaphor. i also have scenes where he and sherlock cope with his ptsd & depression with levity, because i think laughter is a vital way to confront really bad things (and shared gallows humor is a part of their canon relationship that i really buy). if you don’t feel that way and/or it will upset you, please don’t read. it’s not much but it could trigger some folks, so stay safe; love y’all always.
> 
> magic realism; your feelings show up as colors on your skin. 
> 
> spoilers for up to series 2. 
> 
> thanks so much for reading!

The war is pale.

Sand. The bare bowl of the sky. Wanness of light—of light, light, the sun, darting wires, a torch that moves like someone flinching, piercing and insubstantial.

It washes over his skin in gradients, concentrates at his shoulder, his thigh. Above all, it seeks, reaching for color, sucking at trails of it when they curl newly from his hands or the soles of his feet.

There is the scar. His skin is the war and the war is pale, so his skin is pale. The war is John and the war is pale, so John is pale.

But when he dreams it is in terrible color. Grey, steel. There is a whirl of guns, bullets—no, more than that, sky and earth, dull beats of blue and green. John keels over into sand that is golden and seeps hotly into his knees. And then his body is cracking open, bones folding out in whittled, creamy ash peaks, and the red part is the shape of him, turned inside out and wrenched onto the sand.

He wakes and scrabbles for his gun; he sweats and curses and does not cry. He lies there breathing and tells himself about the shadows of his flat, tries to shut his eyes as he feels the slow sink of reality. John Watson, Afghanistan. The ache of his shoulder, his leg. Sand. John Watson—not Afghanistan. Anymore.

What, then?

In dreams, he faces the leer of blood, and finds no brightness in waking.

-

A little boy. He is crumpled. He’s sick; there’s a rash. It’s too much. There is an older boy, sneering:

“You can’t do this—God, look at you. You can’t live like this.”

It is too much. The little boy is whimpering; he can’t even speak. He wouldn’t say anything, anyway. He’s too young to know.

The older boy is sneering, and the little boy is crumpled, and that is the way things are.

-

When Mike spots him in the park, John can’t miss his concern: it spikes orange from his wrist as he extends his hand, shouting something about how long it’s been, how good it is to see him after all this time.

“Really, mate,” he says, and maybe he means it. John doesn’t know, and the clue could be anywhere: joy coloring the back of his neck, his inner ear, the space between his toes. Or nowhere at all. “Really.”

John wants to tell him not to worry. Then again, maybe the concern isn’t for him at all— maybe it’s for his wife whose mother is pressuring them to have kids, or his dog who keeps trying to break into the trash, or his job that pays the bills but is only enough. It could be anything, really. Mike might not even have reason for concern, not yet; maybe he hasn’t even noticed it. The paleness. Yet.

“Listen.” Mike is talking; they are moving, John realizes, moving side by side through the park. “I’ve got an idea.”

“I don’t know,” says John. Mike explains anyway, and John keeps saying it: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. His eyes flicker down; the bright concern has not faded from Mike’s wrist. John says he doesn’t know, but Mike insists.

“You must hate living in that flat. And it could—you know, well.” A baby blue flush of hesitation. “It could be good for you.”

Mike looks earnest. He does. And suddenly John hopes, with the tight scratching loneliness of wanting to preserve in someone a precious thing that we never expect to recover for ourselves, that Mike attributes the paleness that spreads over John’s neck to an apathy that has nothing to do with him, with this—with, well. All of it.

“Well,” says John. He does hate his flat: little licks of red that claw at his neck before sinking back into the sand. He feels one now in the space below his ear, and Mike’s eyes flicker to it. A yellow blotch of hope appears at his temple: cerebral, friendly.

John sighs.

“It couldn’t hurt.”

Mike beams at him, satisfied, and John is not surprised. Not even as he feels the paleness lapse back into place, sucking away the color into the non-shadow that feels so starkly visible to him that it almost makes him wonder how anyone on earth could possibly believe that he was alright, that it really mattered to him where he lived and with whom and if at all.

Still, he’s not surprised that Mike beams. He knows that seeing the colors is not the same as understanding them.

-

The older boy says, “Mummy can’t see you like this.”

And the little boy will do it; he’ll do it. Nobody could expect him to know any better. The older boy is sneering; that would be enough in and of itself. Even if it weren’t, the little boy is just a child. He has simply not been alive long enough to learn all the different ways that people have of hiding.

-

He is bent over a microscope. Long spiderlike fingers—pale. A girl is with him. He is not curious about John; no darts of silver fly out from beneath his fingernails when he takes his phone, turning it over in his palm.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?”

“Sherlock,” says the girl.

Her eyes are wide and sad as she looks between him and John. She must see it all over John, then—the sand, the sky, the flinching light. John looks at her. Just above her collar, a touch of pink. Shyness. And from the tentative flowering pattern of it, not just any shyness: a crush. On Sherlock? He almost wants to smile. Then again, maybe it’s for someone else and she’s just been thinking about them. Perhaps they texted her something sweet, or maybe even came by, brought her something for lunch, kissed her cheek. But—ah, no. When Sherlock looks at her, the color flares and flutters, all the way up her neck. She must know it’s there; she must be used to it by now. Poor thing.

“Molly,” says Sherlock.

Fingers—pale. Not even a bruising of annoyance, for all the archness of his tone.

“How did you know that,” John says.

Sherlock looks at him for a long time. Then, at last:

“Not from your suicidal ideation, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

And he goes back to his microscope. Fingers—pale. No. Empty.

“ _Sherlock_ ,” says Molly.

Empty. Blank.

John’s heard about people like him, of course. He thought they were more of an old wives’ tale, but still. He had heard.

Blank.

He swallows. He knows that colorlessness is not the same as paleness. The next thing he thinks he knows he shouldn’t think but he can’t help it.

It is not the same as color, either.

If that’s the real reason he comes to 221B the next day, well. He has nothing left to lose.

-

There is a smile, and it is yellow, and there are holes—from bullets, holes from bullets, bullet holes. In it. In the smile, in its yellowness. And there is Sherlock, and he is saying:

“I’m far less interested in the color of her palms, inspector, than I am in that of her coat.”

And there is John, too, and he is saying: fantastic, amazing, unbelievable, genius. There is John, and for some reason he is kneeling, pulling back her shirt—and he is trying not to think, in the beat of his blood, war war war war war—and looking with the death-seeing eyes that he thought he would never use again, would never want to.

“Her stomach.” Swollen, pale yellow. “Fear.”

Lestrade, hovering above them, runs a hand over his face.

“Bloody awful,” he says.

Sherlock doesn’t even look. He darts to the end of her wrist and back, pinching her sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. Focused.

“Goodness, John,” he says at last. “What  _would_  I do without you?”

He’s being sarcastic. Nasty, even. Lestrade barks a rebuke at him. John figures it’s because he sees John’s paleness and feels sorry for him. Lots of people think that you simply cannot be nasty to people who are suffering like that, that something about their pain exempts them from the way you might treat regular human beings. Really, nobody wants to disturb the glassy surface of people’s agony; nobody wants to try to understand the way it is not an exemption from but rather a part of being a regular human being. They don’t want to understand because of what it might imply for them.    

Sherlock tells Lestrade to fuck off. He does, and John is silent. Nobody has been unpleasant to him since he got back from Afghanistan. It feels ugly. And is that—it is. At his wrist, a purpling bloom of irritation. He watches, waiting for the color to be sucked away, not sure whether to be relieved or not when it goes.

“Look, Sherlock. I’m a doctor, it’s what I…”

“I do. Not. Care. What. You.  _Do_.” Sherlock’s voice strikes out beats: even, unforgiving. “Just give me the facts.”

Another bruise of not-quite anger, this time at John’s temple. And then there is confusion (muddled, watercolors swirling together), because it really is standard procedure to do a color inventory. Doctors use them all the time. So do police. Detectives. Scotland Yard itself. Hell, it’s so common that all the good criminals know better; they go a long way to cover up their skin, and there’s a whole industry of creams and treatments, completely illegal unless you’re military, diplomacy, sometimes parliament. The stuff is dangerous when unregulated—John thinks of peeling skin, overflow, and fading, fading—but worth it to some people, because it’s important information. It’s important to know.

And, therefore, important to keep hidden.

He looks at Sherlock.

“Those  _a_ _re_  facts.”

Sherlock meets his gaze, and the weight of it bears down.

“They are not. They are—feelings.”

John sits back on his heels, thinking about all the talk he’s heard about blankness. The entry in his medical encyclopedia is negligible: nobody really understands it. But there is talk. Always talk. And the talk is—well, the talk makes John surprised that no trickle of fear slips up his spine as he sits gazing at Sherlock now. He blames it on the paleness because it’s easier that way.

“You can’t even see them, can you?”

Sherlock barks a laugh—performative, arrogant. It is something he wants other people to hear. And yet when he speaks the words are low, controlled. Almost private.

“Don’t be absurd. Of course I can. For example, when we met yesterday I saw your desire to stick a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. Or don’t you recall? It’s still there, by the way. And yet, you have done no such thing. So, what does that tell us? That you are brave? That you are a coward? Or perhaps you are waiting for a sign. From all we can learn from colors, it is just as likely that you are done waiting and are simply too apathetic to do away with your own miserable existence. But is that the case, really? I don’t know. I simply do not. And I suspect that neither do you.”

He turns back to the body.

“I see them all, John,” he says. “I just don’t trust them.”

He does not look at John, and in that absence of gaze John senses a secret being kept from them both. Lestrade has returned, and he is yelling and Sherlock is snapping at him and yet the world is crumpling into a single intimacy the parts of which are Sherlock John and no one else because Sherlock spoke quietly not because he cares about protecting anyone’s secrets—quite the opposite, the joy of his life is rooted in exposure—so why?

John looks down at the woman’s neck.

“Not asphyxiation,” he says at last.

“Splendid,” says Sherlock.

He sounds almost like he means it—though, perhaps, not about the body. Later, John shoots a man for him. Why? The question remains.

On his wrists, exhilaration rusts over.

Days pass before it fades.

-

At first, he looks at Mycroft and thinks that they are the same. His heart pounds. It’s genetic, then? He can’t recall. Mycroft catches his gaze and a brief bright tongue of amusement (goldenrod, flat, not shimmering and unsteady like laughter) stabs up his neck, as if on cue.

“Government,” he says.

It makes sense. Still, John does not see the telltale waxiness of creams layered thick on his skin. In fact, his neck is fleshy, even blemished in places: flawed, real. John rationalizes that the government stuff is some of the best. It must be designed to make it look like there’s really nothing there. John swallows, thinking of the way Sherlock had laughed at him. Had he been wrong, then?

“And…?”

Mycroft quirks a brow, and John gets the feeling that he is trying to choose between surprise, amusement, and anger that he was bold enough to ask.

“My brother is as you suspected.”

“Ah,” says John.

“Does that not…scare you?”

“Afghanistan.”

Now Mycroft smiles: a cold, slender thing.

“Of course. I did verify. Though, it could’ve been Iraq.”

John grins. He hopes Mycroft doesn’t know why he’s grinning, if only because it would be nice to know something that Mycroft does not.

“Could’ve been.”

“Yes, well.”

Mycroft looks down, taps his umbrella against his shoe. Then he meets John’s gaze again: inscrutable, not haughty or amused, not anything at all. Analytical, removed. John expects to feel afraid—that gaze is objective, which means it is a degree removed from human—but instead he finds that defiance washes over his skin, runs down his shoulders and onto his hands. It lingers. Mycroft looks at him. At the color.

“To rent another flat would be…prudent,” he says at last. “My brother is many things, Doctor Watson, few of which qualify—according to most, naturally—as, how might we phrase it,  _good_. In other words, not even I can guarantee your safety.”

“Right, that changes everything.” John is surprised by the poison in his voice. It is a new thing to him, this core of bitterness from which it wells. He wants to say that with or without Sherlock there is no one on earth who can guarantee his safety, namely because he wants to fucking die. But he thinks Mycroft might already know. “If even  _you_  can’t…”

Mycroft holds his gaze for a few beats more, then turns.

“Very well, then. As you like.”

John’s shoulders slacken. But then Mycroft looks over his shoulder. His eyes prick, briefly, at John’s shoulder, his leg. The weight of his body pressing into the cane. Or—not pressing, not at all.

“Do not forget, Doctor Watson: caring is not an advantage.” His eyes narrow. “For everyone involved.”

In that moment John thinks that Mycroft will turn back around and force him to leave Baker Street once and for all, and there will be nothing he can do about it because he gets the sense that when Mycroft Holmes wants something done, it is done. The thought fills him strangely anew with despair.

But Mycroft simply walks away.

John watches him go—what else can he do?—and wonders what test, exactly, he has passed.

-

The Afghanistan of his nightmares: sand sky earth light flinching bullets blood sand.

Afghanistan itself: all of those things, and laughter.

Sometimes you just have to laugh. When you’re with a couple other boys—boys, just boys—and you hear the whistle, feel the heat on the back of your necks. You learn fast, that’s how death feels: hot. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look. Liquid sun, sweat; the weirdly gentle spray of red, expanding from a body being torn apart like petals unfurling. You and the boys hide behind a rock, or a truck or something, anything, and your shoulders are pressing together and you look at each other and it’s so so intimate because you’re all trying to make sure that each other stays the only thing you ever look at, the only thing you ever remember about this, for the rest of your lives.

A certain closeness, violence and joy. Both are like explosions.

There was nothing else to do but laugh; it was the only good thing, and it had to make all the other things not quite bad enough. It had to. In that moment, looking at each other and nothing else, laughter good as liquid gold would shiver over their bodies—crouched, even as they were, in sand.

Sherlock does not buy groceries. John knows he eats—tea, toast, several strands of spaghetti at Angelo’s—and yet. No groceries. So John buys groceries. He hates buying groceries. He didn’t always, but ever since he got back from his tour, it’s been hard. He would get takeaway or something for the microwave or he would just forget to eat. He had liked cooking before, but there was just no strength for it now. Paleness had a funny way of doing that to him, making him feel like the smallest things (brushing teeth, tying shoes, chopping onions) would really kill him, once and for all.

John hates buying groceries. But someone has to do it. Don’t they?

So he buys groceries and makes eggs in the morning even though Sherlock doesn’t care and won’t touch a thing.

“It’s good,” says John. He is unclear why he feels he has to justify actually eating breakfast to anyone, but to Sherlock, he does. “Really.”

Sherlock looks over the rim of his teacup. Down at his plate. Back at John.

“Subjective.”

“You’re insulting me.”

Sherlock smirks.

“Not my intent, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Other things Sherlock does not do: dishes, laundry, friendly “good-mornings” and “good-nights.” Or sleep, as far as John can tell; catnaps on the couch don’t count. He does shower, and in fact he irons his clothes. Suits and suits and suits, all black, and his beautiful silk shirts. He does his hair, too. It’s strange, because John gets the sense he hates living in a body—having to feed it, wash it, plaster it with nicotine patches and put it to rest every twelve (thirty-six, forty-eight, sixty, seventy-two) hours—and yet he is meticulous about that body’s outward appearance. Strange. He’s strange. That’s all there is to it.

Strange. One morning, John gets up, pulls on his robe, and shuffles into the kitchen. It isn’t until he’s finished putting on the kettle that he really understands that Sherlock is sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by all the apparati one needs to draw blood—the slender needle perched smugly in his chalky hand—and also a cup of tea. John blinks.

“What are you doing?”

“Drawing blood,” says Sherlock. “Obviously.”

John waits. Quiet. He drums his fingers against the counter.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why, Sherlock, at the tender hour of seven in the morning, are you drawing your own blood?”

“Experiment.” Sherlock pricks his skin, grins as the blood rushes free. “I need at least seven vials. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Of course.”

“Quite.”

“Well, then.” John looks away, looks back at him. More finger drumming. “Where are you going to keep it?”

“The fridge,” says Sherlock. “Where else?”

The kettle whistles; John pours the tea, because he’s not sure what else to do. Sherlock’s blood rushes into the vial, fills it up. John wonders if he notices it, the way John can’t quite bring irritation to bubble up on his wrists. He doubts it’s because of the paleness.

“It’s hardly my fault.” Sherlock caps off the vial. “They have to be kept at a certain temperature.”

John says he’s moving out.

“Delightful.” And—there, right there. Sherlock might be smiling. “Now, would you please make yourself useful and help me staunch the flow?”

Later that night, John still doesn’t feel like cooking—only eggs in the morning, eggs in the morning—so he gets Thai takeaway. He’s on the phone with the restaurant when he pauses for a long moment. Then, he orders for two. Sherlock drew a lot of blood that day, he should eat something. The food comes, and John goes into the sitting room and puts a carton of pineapple fried rice at Sherlock’s elbow. He does not look at it. An hour later, he has not so much as unwrapped the chopsticks.

“You  _do_  eat, don’t you?”

Sherlock’s eyes flit to him, narrow.

“ _Ob_ viously.”

The word snakes around John, tightens. As Sherlock meant it to. But he only rolls his eyes.

“No, not obviously.” He gets up, unwraps the chopsticks, opens the carton, and thrusts it at Sherlock, who does not move to take it from his hand. “I get that you wish I was better at deductions, but you can’t ask me to draw a conclusion from insufficient data.”

Sherlock eyes the carton like it’s dangerous.

“I am human. I am alive. I have been alive for many, many years, certainly much more than the more or less month-long period of time—Mahatma Gandhi, 21 days, although there were also those Irish hunger strikers, between 46 and 73 days, now that  _was_  exceptional—in which one can survive without food. Therefore, I must eat. In fact, I daresay you have even witnessed it.” He leans back in the chair. “Might that not be sufficient data, Doctor Watson?”

“You’re only human because you haven’t found a way out of it yet,” grumbles John. “But yes: you need food. Especially after drawing your own fucking blood. All the more reason for you to, you know, eat.”

“Boring!” cries Sherlock. He sounds like a child; his last defense, then. “Go elsewhere if you’re only going to exhaust me.”

John is not sure whether, by “elsewhere,” Sherlock means another room, another flat, or another universe. All this over Thai takeaway, which is to say all this over the fact that John does not want Sherlock to die of malnutrition. It’s funny—hilarious, even—but he knows better than to laugh.

“Sherlock. Eat.”

Sherlock looks at him, at the carton, back at him. At the carton. Then he snorts—like it’s the most menial, dehumanizing thing in the world—snatches up the chopsticks, and takes a bite. Chews. Swallows.

John turns on the telly.

Weeks pass like this. The cases blur together. Sometimes Sherlock won’t speak to John, or sometimes he goes out and comes back bleeding, and once he even collapses in the middle of the street because he hasn’t slept in days and he is a person, a human person, after all. John gets a job at the surgery to help pay rent, and it’s fine but it’s not like the Work, stretched by Sherlock always into a proper noun, which is more than a little self-important, but, well, John can’t help but agree. Nothing, it turns out, is quite like the Work. And that’s. Well. That is what it is.

Then one night they’re chasing down some second-rate criminal—a robbery, an injured child, boring, honestly—and Sherlock is downstairs and John is upstairs, scanning for signs, and a man materializes from the woodwork and he is huge and John is caught off-guard and then he is on the floor and the man’s hands are around his neck, squeezing.

It’s coming, he realizes. Ironic? Not quite. Not enough. He can’t find it within himself to fight it off. At least Sherlock will have his answer: John really was just a coward, in the end. That’s fine. It’s all fine.

Death.

His only regret is that, with the man’s hands around his throat, he can’t laugh at it.

Then, the door bursts open.

“Tiresome.”

Sherlock kicks, clips the man in the chin; his hands loosen on John, he can breathe. He is gasping. Aching. Alive. He punches. The man falls back, out cold. Sherlock does not even look at him, let alone at John; he goes straight for the gun, plucks it from the floor with gloved hands.

“This, however.” He does not try to hide his delight. Finally, what he came here for. “Superb.”

He turns.

“Come along, John.”

John gets up. Groans in pain a little—his chest is aching, his knuckles bloody—but Sherlock won’t wait for long. It is miracle enough that he hangs in the doorway, watching John in a way that is somehow arch despite his smugness, despite the victory that clings to his face thick and obscuring like a summer fog. He knows he’s won, cracked the case. God knows how. But he knows.

John makes it to the doorway. Sherlock nods, turns to go. And then John goes stock still. Because there. Beneath the blood drying on John’s knuckles.

Relief.

John looks at it. And he knows—would know anywhere, already—that Sherlock is looking, too.

It’s gone in seconds. Then, Sherlock analyzes the fingerprints on the gun (he has already deduced it all: previously handled, and not by just anyone), and they find the culprit that night. John’s skin reverts to sand. But Sherlock. He saved John’s life (technically true: motives aside, a life is a life is a life) and even though the case is over, he eats nothing and stays in the sitting room all night (not interesting _enough_ , hissed between his teeth when John asks), and so in the morning when John goes to the kitchen and puts water in the kettle and toast in the toaster and watches the toast pop and looks at the two slices, he thinks that Sherlock can have them, the first pieces of toast which usually John prefers, because, well—less for the life itself than for the reminder of it.

John pours tea. Gets a plate. Pauses.

Does Sherlock put butter on toast? John has seen Sherlock eat toast (rarely is not never), but he doesn’t remember what he likes (Sherlock would remember what John likes, or would not even need to remember, would deduce it from the pattern of his jumper; John is not Sherlock). Fuck. Jam? Honey? Nutella? Peanut butter? Peanut butter and banana? Sliced banana? Sliced in little yellow circles? Almost cute, as if for a child? As if packing their lunch? Oh no. Sherlock does need—nutrients, doesn’t he? Some fat? Some protein? A little sodium? Sugars, preferably natural? Banana sugar is natural. And potassium? Fuck. Who the hell knows what he needs? Well, probably Sherlock.

Actually. Probably not.

John leaves the toast plain. Sherlock is in the sitting room, facing the window: he is still in his dressing gown, who knows if he slept at all, there are charcoal circles under eyes, his hair is wild, he holds his fingers steepled. The morning is all over him: almost yellow, but not quite. Not quite. He sits with his knees drawn to chest, his eyes narrowed. He probably hears John (he hears everything), but he does not look up. He is apparently doing nothing at all, but John knows better now.

He sets the plate on top of Sherlock’s drawn-up knees.

“Here,” he says. “You haven’t eaten in days.”

Sherlock looks away from the window, down at the toast, and up at him.

“Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl.”

John is not really listening; he wants Sherlock to grab the plate so he can stop balancing it on his knees.

“It’s a what now?” He nudges the plate forwards. Sherlock remains motionless. “Eat.”

Sherlock does not. He steeples his fingers and fixes his gaze again on the window.

“Okonkwo. Javert. Yutaka Taniyama. Icarus. Well, sort of.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Matter of interpretation.” He taps his chin. “A better example would be Sylvia Plath. And there’s Marc Anthony…and Cleopatra, of course. Another double. Now there’s an idea! Everything is more fun with a friend, or isn’t that what they say? What about that—Sandra, was it? Or Sarah? She seemed nice, might be available.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” says John, and turns back towards the kitchen.

“I’m only observing,” calls Sherlock. “You’ve got good company.”

John opens the fridge. Knuckles. Human. Half-frozen: unfreezing. Not there last night. Well. He butters Sherlock’s uneaten toast.

“Not my company.”

For a moment, he thinks he said it too quietly. Then, from the sitting room:

“Not  _yet_!”

John bites into what would have been Sherlock’s first meal in thirty-six hours, puts the lid back on the butter dish, and slides it in next to the half-frozen knuckles, which suddenly seem to belong there. Where else would they be? John shuts the fridge. He takes a bite of toast. Chews. Swallows. Another bite. A sip of tea.

And then he is laughing. He is laughing and laughing and laughing. He can’t stop. Survival runs all the way to his very fingertips. His stomach aches with it. Survival, even if for only one more day. Gold and gold and gold and gold.

Then, as if he were Midas, he thinks—though, really, he cannot be sure—that he might hear Sherlock chuckle, too.

-

“You’re upset.”

John considers rolling down his sleeves—the curdling bruises, cords of color twisting like a second set of veins on his forearms—but then thinks why not, why not let him see. As if it matters to him anyway.

“I thought.” He pushes the words between his teeth. “You didn’t make deductions from colors.”

Sherlock frowns.

“I don’t. Can’t be trusted. I have various other physiological clues: your jaw is clenched, there is a flush—blood, I mean—on your neck, and your hand is exhibiting a tremor, ever so slight, but a tremor nonetheless. Not to mention that there are a good number of context clues. For example, you have sighed several times in the past fourteen minutes. More loudly than you do when you think you are not being watched, which leads me to believe that you want me to hear, consciously or otherwise. You also stomped down the stairs to the kitchen. And you are currently glaring at me. As far as I know, I am the only person available to receive your ire; were you angry at Sarah, you would put on this display of passive-aggression in her flat, not ours. Thus, I presume it is meant for me. But please, try to restrain yourself: don’t call me _f_ _antastic_  or _genius_  for this one, seeing as a ten-year-old could have figured it out. Basic human instinct, really.”

He pauses, thoughtful, then adds:

“Moreover, you just made tea, which would not be out of the ordinary—in fact, you often drink tea when you are upset—had you not brewed only enough for yourself. You always offer me a cup.”

John spits out a laugh.

“My first mistake.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“You’re overreacting.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am always serious.” Indeed, he looks almost solemn, betrayed only by the gleam of impatience in his eye. “She is an idiot.”

“She’s my girlfriend, Sherlock! I won’t stand for you to speak about her like that.”

“Like what? An honest man?”

Anger. It bleeds hotly past John’s collar and up his neck: wan, indignant, sickly. Its core is off, misplaced, but he doubts that Sherlock knows that—only doctors, policemen, are trained to see these subtleties. And Sherlock does not trust the heart.

“Don’t, Sherlock. Really. Don’t.”

But Sherlock only sneers.

“Oh, how noble. You simply must spring to her defense, I suppose, because you fancy that you _l_ _ove_  her or some tripe like that.”

“Of course I—well.”

Sherlock quirks a brow.

“Well?”

“It’s. It’s only been a few months.”

Sherlock laughs.

“Right, how could I forget? How like you to adhere to the common timetable for human sentiment. You can’t love someone ordinary after just a few months because it is not ordinary to love someone after so little time. No—it is dangerous, irresponsible,  _s_ _trange_ , God forbid. What  _would_  the neighbors say? So you don’t even consider it, no. Can’t consider it until at least six months have passed, and then you might give it some thought. Sit down, take some notes, draw a conclusion. Just as you will when you calculate when to move in with her, what colors to use at the wedding, how many children to have, where to retire. Because that’s how it works. Love. Isn’t it?”

And then John feels white hot, because he can’t understand why, and Sherlock is grinning venomously and yet there is something unbalanced about it, some tiny panicked particle skittering about beneath the fine set lines of his disdain, but what  _is_  it? John can’t tell, he can’t tell, and he wishes not for the first time for anything to open on that man’s sheet-of-paper skin.

“Fuck off, Sherlock,” he spits. “Like you could ever understand love.”

He’s too angry to regret it. He storms out. But then—

_7:29 PM_ _  
_Lestrade just phoned. SH__

_7:31 PM_ _  
_Where?__

—because he needs it, he realizes then. Admitting it comes with the same bitter sharp relief of tears pricking at the corner of your eyes. He needs it.

Sherlock is already on the scene when John arrives. Double murder: mother and child. Ugly. Sherlock is glowering at Anderson and Donovan, arguing that the mother smothered the infant before she died, that she did not do it to spare its suffering. He knew from a bit of lint or some shit. John’s not really listening; Sherlock is probably (definitely) right, but no one wants to believe that.

“A mother’s love is not a guarantee.” Sherlock is tilting her chin back and forth, examining the blood on her neck. Mottled, there—a tiny strain of gold. But Sherlock looking only at the blood. “Nothing is.”

Donovan pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Fine, fine. But you could at least try to be a little sensitive. It’s a child, for God’s sake. An infant.”

Sherlock snorts.

“It being an infant hardly makes it more or less deserving than an adult human,” he says. “It simply hasn’t been given the chance to ruin something.”

Donovan’s shoulders stiffen. Anderson touches her elbow; sympathy, forced, the color wan. Empty gesture, ulterior motives. Sex, probably. Sherlock would know for sure.

“Don’t bother, Sally,” Anderson sneers. “What would he know about it, anyway? You know. How he…is.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes, opens his mouth, but John beats him to it.

“Shut the fuck up, Anderson. You can’t talk to him like that.”

He grabs Sherlock’s sleeve—careful, so inexplicably careful not to touch his skin—and yanks him past them. Anderson and Sally watch, loose-jawed. John is glaring.

“Let’s go, Sherlock,” he spits. “We have more important things to worry about.”

He can feel Sherlock looking at him, but he doesn’t want to see his expression. Surprise? Disgust? Pride? Gratitude? Or nothing, nothing at all? John clenches his hand shut, glad that the crimson curl of anger (deep, bright, righteous, beating: like a heartbeat, with a heartbeat, anger beating with a heartbeat) burns safely on the inside of his palm—a secret still.

Later that night, they almost get caught. By the mother’s killer, who isn’t a trained criminal but twice as cunning. He chases them down alleyways and up fire escapes. It starts to rain, cold and hard; it’s not often that they find themselves chased. The father killed her, of course. Who else would?

“Actually,” Sherlock revises as they run. “Step-father.”

John tells him to shut up. His shoulder is burning and they’re cornered, he realizes—fuck, at the edge of the rooftop, the step-father about to reach the top of the fire escape, gun in hand. Must be fifteen, twenty feet down. He and Sherlock lock eyes, and it’s really that easy.

They jump.

Like wings the wind picks up John’s coat; the rain pricks his skin; Sherlock’s arms flail, his hands brush his; John’s knees scream, his whole body screams, but he’s alive. He’s alive. Alive alive alive. He and Sherlock collapse against the wall, gasping; the rain-wet bricks bite into their backs and thighs. And John thinks, it’s fucking freezing, and John thinks, here is a madman, and John thinks, it really did feel like flying, and John thinks, gold, John thinks, joy, John is aching, all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes.

“They’ve come back,” says Sherlock.

“What?” says John, though of course he knows, and he knows Sherlock knows he knows. He braces himself for the bite of his retort, for something dug down into him, turning him inside out.

Sherlock rolls his eyes. Turns away. Says:

“In _s_ _ipid_.”

Almost—not quite, but almost—gentle.

-

He is a teenager. But in him still, there is the little boy, a child, really. The boy is trying his best but sometimes he just has to, god, sometimes he just has to. He didn’t want to get caught. He’s usually too smart to get caught. He _wouldn’t_  have gotten caught, never, if it wasn’t for—well, he almost forgets, every time. That it makes him like this.

Rash, rash; rash, rash, rash!  _Damn_  it!

Against the older boy’s shoulder, he slurs:

“I’m sorry, sorry. I just wanted to…”

“Shut up.” Does it surprise the older boy, the grit of his own front teeth? It hasn’t for a long time. But here, now—maybe. “Shut  _up_.”

And into his neck, like a prayer, like breathing, the younger boy tells him:

“Sorry, sorry; I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…”

-

Blue. In old films, black and white, the best actors could conjure a flush onto their skin, and because every shade was grey you could trick yourself into believing it, even though a part of you knew that it wasn’t really there, of course it wasn’t, of course not. Then came technicolor, and for a while that did hurt the magic. It was impossible to believe that the afternoon sky of affection or the cerulean glow of friendship smoothing over an actor’s skin could be anything deeper. It became custom to simply suspend your disbelief, because everyone knew it didn’t say anything about the performance. Feeling something like that is impossible to feign. Maybe it’s better that way.

Blue. Thanks to special effects, it’s everywhere in rom-coms these days. Still, when you see it up on the screen, a part of you knows. It’s not real. Not really real. There something’s missing. Something else. To make it really, really real.

Blue. If you see two people walking on the street with that color on their hands, you can’t help it: your heart curls with envy, with shame. If you’re with your partner, it’s even worse to see it, because you can’t not look at each other and wonder why you don’t look the same. And even though you know better—it happens all the time, plenty of us never feel it, and people can be happy without it, people  _are_  happy without it—it only gets worse, the questions you both ask yourselves, that neither of you wants to admit to asking. In other words:

blue? When will you find someone who wakes that color up inside of you, and what will you and your spouse partner lover best friend say to each other when you do? Or (and maybe this one is worse) what will you say to each other if you never do, if you live the rest of your lives with the color of afternoon sky on your skin? Slowly, slowly going dark?

Blue. There must be a thousand sonnets written about it.

Mycroft is in the sitting room. John is in his robe, scratching his belly as he walks downstairs, and Mycroft is in the sitting room, and Sherlock is perched in the armchair across from him, and both of them are fully dressed—immaculate suits, silk ties—and nether is saying a word, just staring, staring.

“All right, then,” says John after a tic. “Tea, Mycroft?”

“No,” growls Sherlock.

“Tea,” Mycroft replies, “would be delightful.”

John makes the tea. Sherlock and Mycroft say nothing. John comes back. Sherlock and Mycroft say nothing. John hands them their cups and, at last, Mycroft’s eyes rise—slowly, like a bubble of air slipping upwards from the bottom of a glass—to inspect his face.

John endures it; he was a soldier.

“Doctor Watson.” At last, Mycroft leans over the coffee table, selects a cube of sugar, and allows it to fall, primly, into his cup. “You’re looking…well.”

His gaze is acute. Things it rests on: the morning (not-sand) cleanness of John’s skin, and now the back of his neck, where self-awareness flushes. Eager—oh, hell, like a victory—to reveal itself. Between them, the warehouse echoes.

“Thank you,” says John.

“You are welcome indeed,” says Mycroft.

Sherlock sips his tea.

“Are we quite finished here?”

Mycroft rolls his eyes.

“Do relax. Nearly done.”

“Nearly?” John glances between them. “But you haven’t said a word to each other.”

Neither brother so much as looks at him; so little he knows, apparently. True to his word, Mycroft only stays to finish his tea, then he sweeps away, thanking John profusely for his kindness, which would be refreshing for a Holmes if John didn’t know that he only does it to see the rage gather on Sherlock’s temple. It is a little bit funny, to be fair. How his fingertips almost (almost) bruise from how hard he steeples them.

Once Mycroft goes, Sherlock stands by the window, watching the car slide away down Baker Street, shiny and black like an oil stain.

“I don’t understand the two of you,” says John.

Sherlock’s lip curls, reflected in the windowpane.

“There is little worth understanding.”

He doesn’t want to talk. Usually John doesn’t bother, but today, he persists:

“He doesn’t seem…so bad. At least, not bad enough for you to hate him this much.”

Sherlock snorts.

“Please, John; I never miscalculate.”

“All right, all right.” If Sherlock doesn’t want to talk, he won’t; John lets it go. “You’re an arrogant prick, you know that?”

“I do,” says Sherlock. And then the scorn sinks from his voice, leaving it flat, sad and bitter. “He only wants to control me.”

John recovers quickly from his astonishment.

“Mycroft? Control? You don’t fucking say.”

That wrings a laugh from Sherlock; the sound ricochets back on itself in surprise, like someone catching themself in a mirror they didn’t know was there. After a moment, Sherlock runs a hand over his chin.

“Yes, well. He wants to control me most of all.” And then, quieter: “I frighten him.”

A memory strikes John suddenly: the warehouse. He snorts, and Sherlock’s eyebrows rise.

“What, because you’re blank? Of all things, that’s what Mycroft’s afraid of?”

At that, Sherlock seems perplexed. John can’t quite believe it, but there it is: Sherlock, paused, like he’s been asked to explain an idiom or proverb for which he had allowed himself to forget the real meaning because it was so obvious that he never thought anyone, not even the most ordinary person in the universe, would ask him to explain. Of course, he often has to explain things, and this disappoints and frustrates him, but right now he doesn’t look angry or disdainful; this isn’t like his deductions, then. Not like when he thinks people should know what he knows, but they don’t, and he knows they don’t. This is—what? In this case, he must assume that they just  _do_  know, don’t they? And mostly, he’d be right.

But John doesn’t. Sherlock’s hands wheel briefly in the air.

“It is—well. I don’t feel, John.”

“And?”

“And that scares people,” he concludes at last. “Ordinary people.”

“I’m not scared.”

And then Sherlock meets John’s eyes, and every point in him sharpens to a near unbearable focus.

“Nor, John,” he says, “are you ordinary.”

Silence. They hold each other’s gaze for a long, long moment, until John feels suddenly panicked, frantic to say something, for words to break whatever strange shapeless thing it is that gathers between them.

“I don’t think that’s true, anyway.” It comes out soft. Almost silent. “That you don’t feel.”

Soft, almost silent. Like he’s afraid. Is he afraid? Sherlock looks at him. His eyes say nothing. Blank. Controlled. No, no. Just blank. Right? Then he turns away, faces the window. Hands clasped behind his back. No reaching him. No reaching him? No—no reaching him.

“Concluded,” he says at last, so quietly that John can barely hear him. “From insufficient data.”

Later that night, John gets Indian takeaway; he’s eating curry and flipping through the telly when he comes across a rom-com, something recent, trite. Sherlock would hate it; there’s barely plot enough for him to spoil. But John pauses; he doesn’t know why. Or maybe he does. It’s the confession scene. And there it is. Technicolor, technicolor blue.

Sherlock comes in to steal a samosa, which doesn’t upset John anymore because he’s come to expect it, now, and always orders extras. Sherlock stops, for a moment, in front of the telly. He looks at John, who is mesmerized and does not look back. He rolls his eyes.

“Preposterous,” he says, and takes a bite.

The actors are kissing now. Blue, so blue. And John thinks, how amazing are special effects these days. That he almost believes it.

-

Sherlock plays the violin. John knows this, objectively. He hears it at three in the morning, winding up the stairs; he curses it, considers telling Sherlock to shut up even though he knows it won’t work, and slams a pillow over his head; he thinks, in the unwilling recesses of his mind, that it really is beautiful.

John knows that Sherlock plays the violin. But he has never seen it, and he gets the sense that if he has never seen it, it’s because Sherlock doesn’t want him to, and so when he comes home from Tesco one afternoon and there he is, standing by the window, chin tucked bow raised, John wants to throw his hand over his eyes, wants to protect the sudden sacredness that has rooted itself into everything, the armchairs the wallpaper the yellow smile and its bullet holes, but also he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he can’t, couldn’t, not to save his own life maybe not even to save Sherlock’s, because it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful.

Sherlock is liquid, living liquid there in the center of the music, and when he bares the bow against the strings, the note that slips from the intimacy, from the unbearable pressure of their contact, is liquid, and it is—it is bright. Bright, so bright, every note flows into a ribbon of color, rippling and tenuous and alive, and there is Sherlock in the center of all of it, the green and red and yellow and purple and silver and orange and pink and grey and the gold and gold and gold. The colors knot themselves around him, lick at his shoulders, his neck, his cheeks and hands, ricochet from him but always come back, trying again, again and again and again, for as long as he plays. He is surrounded by color; color surrounds him. For as long as he plays.

John shudders into an armchair. From the music comes the color and from Sherlock comes the music. Is this data of all possible data somehow insufficient?

The piece is coming to a close; does Sherlock know that John is there? If he does, he does not stop, he lets the music exhale away like a sigh, like relief, and the last note seems to plunge within John and hook itself on something there. And even as the colors fade, even as Sherlock’s beautiful colors fade, John feels what opening feels like. Like his skin is cracking. He knew, some things he already knew—the heaviness between his legs, he understood from the beginning—but now his skin is cracking as if in a dry wind but there’s nothing, no wind, no desert, nothing, he can’t even remember what sand means, the taste or texture of it, sand? Impossible, not when his skin is cracking and tears swim warm and wet in his eyes.

John looks down at his hands. Clenches his fist.

No, he thinks. No.

There, blooming from the lines of his palm like a fresh wound. No, no, no.

Blue. It’s blue.

No.

-

Sleeve rolled up. Crescent-moon shapes, delicate, pink (blood), vulnerable. He’s twenty, twenty-five; it doesn’t fucking matter. He’s squatting in darkness, in the old empty room, in darkness. He is squatting and he is ringed, uncertainly, in his own vomit, here and there on the floor—stains, bright pools, red yellow green purple pink gold and oh, fuck it. It doesn’t fucking matter.

He hopes, vaguely, to die; won’t do anything about it, though. Never does anything about anything. Not really.

Then, from somewhere very, very distant (and at once acute: he is being shaken, he realizes, at the shoulders), a sound:

“For the love of…of  _god_ , for the love of god.”

Ah. Hopes dashed, then. Oh well. Another day.

He leans into the older boy, even though he hates it, and feels him wipe a lurid tongue of vomit from the corners of his lips. And then from somewhere deep within him a thought slips to the surface: it is weak, and ragged, but it is real.

“I can’t,” he says, “live like this.”

Silence. Long.

“God,” gasps the older boy, at last. “Don’t you see there’s no other way?”

-

Sherlock doesn’t see. John makes sure of that. He doesn’t see, does he? Would John know if he did? Maybe. Maybe. But, he reminds himself, he’s not even looking. Not even looking. No matter how much of a genius you are, it’s hard to see what you don’t ever think to look for.

But Sarah is looking, always looking; Sarah sees it for the first time one night after they’ve had sex, when she is breathing against his shoulder, her stomach and breasts flushed pink and purple with orgasm and oxytocin. Across her back spreads a summer sky, and then there is John, and it’s creeping around his wrist, up his arm—furtively, regretfully, moving like ugliness for all the flaring beauty of the color. She looks, and looks, and he knows she knows it’s not for her.

“It’s not,” he says. “I.”

“Oh, John,” she says.

A strangled silence.

“I don’t,” he manages. “I won’t. It can’t. So.”

She holds his gaze.

“Stay?” he says at last, helplessly. The saddest promise anyone can make, and he is making it to her.

She squeezes his hand, rolls over. Turns out the light.

“Go to sleep,” she says, and he does.

-

John is going to die, and that’s terrible but not so terrible, and then Sherlock finds him, of course he finds him, and John is not just going to die he is dying, right then and there, dying all over again, he is dying of fear. He wants to scream, don’t come any closer, he wants to scream, please. Please, do not come any closer. Please.

“Run,” he says. “Sherlock. Run.”

Sherlock doesn’t run. He never does listen.

When he grabs John, when he pulls away the bomb, John can’t handle it—the closeness, the weight of Sherlock’s breath, the frantic stumbling of his fingers which are still nimble but so suddenly unlike him, so unlike him. He is afraid, there’s no denying it, and his fear feels almost like, almost like, fuck, it feels almost like love, and John can’t. Can’t do it. He gasps:

“People might talk.”

Sherlock looks at him. The color of the water is in his eyes. For a moment, John thinks: he thinks, I love you; he thinks, holy hell; he thinks, are you going to kiss me?

Sherlock smirks.

“They do little else.”

No, no. The bomb falls away. Of course not. And John rubs his wrists, praying the color (blue magnified and leering, brilliant in its desperation, swimming in deep pits of yellow, yellow fear) won’t bleed past his sleeves. He assesses the pain. Says thank you, Sherlock, thank you. Gruffly. Sherlock smiles (rare, relieved, grateful, surprised, question mark), but then his eyes widen, and John knows that the tiny red circle—leering, electric light, no feeling at all—that is suddenly trained on Sherlock’s forehead is reflected on his own.

In that moment, John thinks he sees it again. On his skin. Like morning sun, breaking through blinds. On his skin. On Sherlock’s skin.

Fear.

And then Moriarty waltzes back onstage, and when the world explodes all John can see is Sherlock and that tiny, tiny breath of color, and then nothing, nothing at all.

-

His stomach, beneath the hospital sheet: blue and blue and blue and blue. And Sherlock, standing over him. Fingers in his hair. Pale.

No—empty. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Blank.

John knows, then, that he saw wrong. He shuts his eyes, willing Sherlock not to look.

-

After Moriarty, everything is the same. And yet, something changes. It starts. John doesn’t know how. But it starts.

They’re sitting in their chairs, and John is working on his next blog post, and Sherlock is thinking, or hallucinating, or performing cellular respiration or whatever it is he does when he steeples his fingers like that, and then John feels, like intuition but sharper, clearer still, the weight of Sherlock’s gaze. He almost looks up, almost laughs, almost says, “What, do I have something on my face?”

But he can’t. Sherlock is looking at him, and it feels like touch.

It feels like touch. It feels like touch, and then later, well. Later, John gets takeaway, and he hands the carton to Sherlock and there is a brief moment where their hands brush, just the tips of their fingers but still, it’s their skin, and it’s touch, and it’s not that it’s lingering, it’s not that it’s loaded with secret meaning, it isn’t, no—it’s just, it’s just, it’s never happened before. And John wants to look up but doesn’t dare, only clears his throat (there, right there, must be all the information Sherlock needs) and goes back to the kitchen, hands balled into fists, color exploding urgently along the slope of his back.

He grips the counter for a long moment. The throat clearing doesn’t even matter. John must have already given away too much. Was it an experiment, then, their fingers brushing? He aches as he takes plates out of the cabinet, forks from the drawers. John Watson’s Heart, A Dissertation. He tries to tell himself that it doesn’t matter, that nothing will change; even if Sherlock knows everything, he won’t care. It’s not like he’ll kick John out of the flat. It’s not like—Christ, John breathes, fuck. It’s not like he’ll take him away. From here. From him.

No. That, Sherlock would not do.

Wouldn’t he?

John brings the plates back to the sitting room. Sherlock does not look at him. Which is just like always. It’s just like always, and relief comes to John with a loneliness so perfect that it feels like something breaking, flooding him until he understands the weight of his own body as only that of who he is, of his love, and the impossibility of sharing them. Sherlock, I love you I love you I love you I love I love I love—

you, God  _damn_  it. Sherlock, I. Breathe, breathe. No no no. It’s alright, John tells himself. It’s the truth and it’s all I have and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.

And yet, a week later they watch telly, and Sherlock sits beside him and their shoulders touch, and remain. And remain, and remain. And then there’s a case and Lestrade is talking and when John crouches by the body Sherlock puts his hand on the nape of his neck for just a second, just a second, but still it’s a miracle that color does not surge and sing against his skin. And John does not look at Sherlock, doesn’t dare, but it keeps happening. It keeps happening. Still, John isn’t stupid enough to think of it as a beginning. Even as the blue blooms so deep on his skin he thinks it might touch the very marrow of his bones. It isn’t a beginning. It can’t be.

And yet.

He does not know how it starts. But it starts.

-

Like a notebook, like a slate, like a check for anything anyone could imagine Sherlock Holmes might ever want, Irene Adler is blank. Blank and beautiful and brilliant, brilliant; her body flows in long, continuous bands of motion, winding around Sherlock, never quite touching and yet always, always meeting him at every turn, every breath. She leads, drawing Sherlock forwards as if she knew how to magnetize his every capillary and in the network of her own blood beating had installed the necessary poles.

When they level with each other in the steps of their private waltz (the broken rhythms of which they join between them, somehow, and John hates it, hates it), her gaze encompasses him. John watches, ignorant. He is a stranger, he realizes then, an utter stranger. He grits his teeth in rage and humiliation, shame. An ache spreads from his sternum, and he can imagine it already. The discolored blue.

A stranger, how could he have believed anything different.

The dance eases; silence clings to the room, to Irene and Sherlock’s bodies. It’s over, but it does not feel merciful to John. On Irene’s face there is something almost light, a sort of sharp and expanding comprehension. A not-quite-sunrise.

She and Sherlock do not look away from each other.

“Right,” she says at last. “Never showing, never telling.”

And then, with a crumpling at her brow:

“I know, love. I know.”

Later, she drugs him with a swift prick in the throat; the motion is easy, practiced, something she must have done hundreds of times before, and yet, her hand drags with something like sadness.

When John gets Sherlock home, he tries to talk; he lolls against John’s neck, elastic with the drug, and his breath is hot, unbearably hot, and John hates him a little bit, for being so close and breathing and for making it all so, so impossible. He is wrestling him upstairs, and he is trying to talk, and it is not working, and John is praying that all the color he can feel living on his skin does not flush past his clothes because it feels to him, in that moment, that it would be the end of everything.

They make it to the bedroom. In the doorway, Sherlock groans.

“She’s so…”

The rest is unintelligible. John is trying to maneuver Sherlock onto the bed and Sherlock is still trying to talk, and John is terrified he is going to fall on top of him and he will feel his body all against his, the bones and blood, the utter reality of it, and then what will he do, what will he do?

“What?” His voice scrapes, stumbles, but there: Sherlock’s head falls against the pillow, and his eyes flutter, his breathing slows. John leans away. Thank god, thank god, thank god. “Sherlock, enunciate.”

“So like me,” he mumbles.

“Yes,” says John. Wondering, briefly, if he might cry. “She’s just like you.”

“Not you,” he says. And suddenly his eyes are open, looking at him—lucid, almost. “You’re different.”

“Me?”

“Yes.” And their faces are close, so close, and no. No no no. “Not like us at all.”

John can’t move. Fear, utter fear. Whatever Sherlock does next, he knows he will accept it. The strength has drained from him, drawn into the sudden slip of closeness. Into the taught skin of the moment, a tiny expanse of time pulled flat and trembling between them.

It passes. The moment passes. Sherlock’s eyes cloud again, and his body softens, and he presses his cheek into the pillow, mumbling:

“Not at all, not at all, not at all.”

If Sherlock noticed the meticulousness with which John pries his clinging fingertips from his sleeves—not wanting to move the fabric, for him to see the blue shot through with every ugly color in the universe—he does not mention it in the morning. Instead, John makes tea, and when Sherlock comes downstairs, they have breakfast in silence. It is a careful, built-up thing, and it is so very unlike them. John reads the paper until he can’t bear it anymore. He can’t forget the implication in her voice.

He swallows his toast, puts down the paper. Clears his throat.

“Never showing, never telling?”

Sherlock sips his tea.

“Don’t bother,” he says, simply. “She was wrong. Objectively.”

Later—when she’s dead, when the flat is quiet, when the mournful strains of Sherlock’s violin ease into nothing (he’s never played like that before, never so sad, and now the strains that once existed, that brief unbelievable evidence of his heart, those strains ease off into nothing, nothing)—later, John sits and does not drink the tea he made, and feels gnawed at from the outside in. He doesn’t have to lift his shirt to know it’s there, green, spreading around his navel thick and blooming as if from broken capillaries. Like storm clouds, like the sickness of a sky before it shudders apart.

Apart? John won’t. He won’t. Still, he can’t help it; he goes to Sherlock’s room. He is sitting on the end of the bed, staring at nothing. When John comes in, he looks up, then down again. Strange, that he looks and then looks away. He never does that.

Strange. Terrible.

“You want to know,” he says.

It is not a question. John runs a hand over his face, regrets it—gives too much away, that.

“I supposed I do,” he says at last. “How did you beat her?”

The absence of a smirk on Sherlock’s face is a gaping wound.

“It was simple,” he says. “Even you would have known.”

John bites back the anger because he knows it’s magnified by Irene, and he doesn’t want to admit it to himself, doesn’t want Sherlock to know, because if he says it he will know, maybe already does. He has not touched him in days.

“Gee, thanks. So. How did you know?”

Sherlock meet his eye for a long moment, and John wills it away—green, the fester of it, the brewing storm. Finally, Sherlock looks away. Expression inscrutable. Again, it is terrible.

“If you must know,” he says at last. “She turned pink.”

-

On the fringes of his consciousness, there is the older boy.

“You know it’s better this way.”

Hatred. He had been immersed in himself, spinning through the crooked hallways of his own mind, and he doesn’t want to find his way, not to this place (hospital bed), this time (he is twenty-seven), not to this person (Daedalus, he thinks, so cold in his craft, and his lips nearly curve). But the older boy won’t leave; he knows the older boy won’t leave. So he breathes once through the tiny space that, in the ferocious set of his expression, he has left open between his lips.

“Go. Away.”

“This is hubris.”

“In _deed_. Call me Icarus.”

“Don’t be such a child.”

“He did it on purpose, you know.”

Another long silence. When the older boy speaks the timber of his voice cracks, shot through with what he really means. Many hollowed out places and passageways within it. Rare, that.

“I’m worried.”

Don’t open eyes. Don’t open eyes. Don’t—

“It is under control.”

“Is it, now?”

His old voice slinks back. The younger boy’s nostrils flare. What—no. No. Don’t slip.

“It is under. Control.”

A pause. Long, labored; in it, there is more meaning than any words. He hates him, hates him.

“I see.” The older boy’s voice loses its distance, loosens into something almost amused, and that is worse than anything else, it’s venom, it’s fire. “In that case, don’t come crying to me.”

-

After Irene, everything is the same. And yet, something changes. It starts. And this time, well, it doesn’t even matter to John, how it starts. It starts. It starts.

At first, it’s worse. They get a case, so Sherlock is happy, but the ride to Baskervilles is loaded with silence; with John’s unspoken, crackling jealous grief; and with Sherlock’s lacking—of response, of anything, or maybe it’s just confusion, whatever he makes of it, who knows. Then there’s a bed and breakfast, and a room with one bed, and that’s terrible, that might be the worst moment of it all, and then, for a little while, it’s okay. Or not okay, exactly—it’s just nothing, because they can’t exactly think about it because, well, there’s a fucking hound, a fake hound at first until suddenly it’s real, until suddenly they’re sitting by the fireplace and Sherlock is telling him it’s real, and John is laughing until he’s serious, and then he takes the scotch out of Sherlock’s trembling hand and says hey, hey, hey, let’s go back to the room if you’re going to yell like that, not expecting him to agree because Sherlock never agrees, never follows John, never, but then he  _does_ , he follows him down the hall and up the stairs, and then they’re back in the room and John turns on the lamp and sits on the edge of the one bed and Sherlock stands by the door, unmoving, still gripping the knob with a hand that does not tremble.

“You have to calm down,” says John, and feels like an idiot right away, of course.

A stretch of silence.

“Sorry,” he manages.

Sherlock, still standing rigid at the door, gives him the shortest, slightest nod.

“Could you, maybe.” John feels like every word is a bridge, fragile, bending beneath his weight; he cannot, cannot afford to fall. “Tell me about it?”

Sherlock looks at him, then, and there is something in his eyes that makes John think it’s starting, it’s starting, god help him, nothing can stop it now.

“It’s very simple,” he says. “I’m afraid.”

John almost laughs.

“We almost die every other week, and now you’re upset about it?”

“No, John. Think, for once in your life.” And his voice is trembling, it’s really trembling, and John regrets the almost laughter, wants to reach for him, fold him up within the structure of his own body, but he knows he can’t, he can’t, and then Sherlock is standing up, and he’s taking a step forward, and his arms hang stiff at his sides, and for the first time it looks like Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know what to do—with himself, with anything. “I  _feel_  afraid.”

And John can’t help it: it’s his first instinct, to get up from the bed, take a step to match him, grab his hand, to turn it over and stare at his wrist. Nothing: blank. No color. Is it locked so deeply inside his heart, then?

And then John is holding his wrist and feeling the jumping of his pulse.

“You—”

“If you expect anything of me,” says Sherlock, and his voice is so tight, straining over each syllable, so tight that John thinks it would have been deep and gasping and laden, laden, laden, were he not forcing it between his cemented together teeth. “Even one single thing, John. You expect too much.”

“I don’t,” says John, confused, stupid, because it is the only way he can be in that moment even though he knows everything Sherlock really means. “Expect color, Sherlock, I know you, I wouldn’t—”

Sherlock opens his mouth to speak, but the words die, John can see them die on his lips, can imagine their crumpled bodies falling into the narrowness between them, and isn’t that just perfect for them, those tiny deaths before this comes into being, whatever it is, before John looks at Sherlock there is dying, words dying, words becoming nothing in those several heartbeats before they meet each other’s eyes and John lifts Sherlock’s wrist, which he is still holding, with its jumping pulse, before John lifts Sherlock’s wrist which he is still holding with its jumping pulse and to the culmination of his skeleton, the tender small meeting places of bone and skin, presses his mouth and sucks.  

And he knows that, from the juncture of vein and lips—from the wake of those thousand tiny deaths—there flowers up into his face an infinite, infinite blue.

Sherlock’s breath escapes once, with a cracking sound, and then he lunges for John, hands on his shoulders, slamming him up against a wall, and again he is gasping, eyes screwed shut, face almost buried in John’s neck but not quite, their noses a hairsbreadth apart, Sherlock’s teeth grit again, and John is immobile, not daring to move and at the same time immobile, unable to do anything but watch him, watch Sherlock, watch the jagged breathing boiling up from what could be the deepest parts of him.

“Sherlock—”

And then it comes, the kiss, and he must know, John thinks, he must see, or feel, or know, or  _whatever_ the blue, the blue that eclipses John entirely. Their teeth clack together, Sherlock’s tongue lashes out, his fingers dig into John’s hair, and John is blue, nothing more, Sherlock groans against his mouth, he is blue and nothing more.

When John slips off his coat, Sherlock is still blank; when John undoes the buttons at his throat, Sherlock is still blank; when John eases open his belt buckle, Sherlock is still blank; when John presses him back against the mattress and hooks his knees up to his shoulders and runs his hands all over him and kisses him, once, at the slope of his neck, just once, knowing exactly how much tenderness he’s allowed without making it too clear, too direct, like words between them, like color, Sherlock is still blank; when John gasps into his neck and shudders from some place lodged unthinkably deep within himself, Sherlock is still blank; when he holds him for a heartbeat after, he is blank.

“I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.” John realizes that he must have sobbed the words, in the middle of it all. “God Sherlock I love you I love you I love—”

Blank. Afterwards, they lie next to each other. Not holding each other. Not even speaking. But next to each other all the same. And John, barely breathing, his entire body suffused with color, turns out the light, and rolls over, and dares—dares, dares, dares—to lay one hand on the fall of Sherlock’s hip. And leave it there. And sleep.

Blue, so blue, and blank.

Sherlock does not move his hand away.

John will sleep.

Blank. Sherlock is blank.

John doesn’t care. He wouldn’t care no matter what. The thing he’s starting to think, though, is that what you see is not exactly what you should believe.

-

Not under control. Hubris. God  _damn_  it. Icarus! A joke but. Well. And the sun—rays, fine white lines. Nostrils burning. God damn it god damn it god damn it. The detective inspector, his brow broken, disappointed, the dark ashy swirling shade of it, what does he  _care_ , oh for the love of—and the older boy, not even upset this time. At his core he loves a victory too much.

Honest, at least. That might be a little bit gratifying. When’s the last time they were honest with each other?

Hospital bed, again. And the older boy, sitting, legs crossed at the knee. Prim.

“You really must listen to me, this time.”

“A deal,” growls the younger boy. “First, the Work.”

“What about it?”

“Furnish it.”

A soft chuckle. Loathsome. But—worth it. If only barely.

“Of course.”

“And tell the detective inspector he can trust me.”

“My dear boy. He already does.” A snort. “Ordinary people are so naive.”

The younger boy shuts his eyes, sets his teeth

“And!”

“And?”

“Nicotine.”

The older boy breathes out—almost a snort, not quite.

“What for?”

“For some goddamn  _t_ _exture_ , you…” No. No. Grit teeth. Grit teeth. “For a…simulacrum.”

“Hmm.”

“Well?”

“Patches.”

“I swear—”

“Patches, or nothing.”

The younger boy curls his hands into fists in hospital sheets that feel like paper against his skin.

“Patches, then.”

“And if I agree, you’ll…restrain yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Just as I’ve showed you how to do, all this time?”

“Yes.”

“Just as I’ve showed you how to do all this time—tirelessly, and out of pure love, I might add—even though you never quite listened, but now you see the error of your ways, and you will do as I suggest?”

“You don’t know anything about love.”

The older boy arches a brow.

“Neither do you.”

A pause. And then again, the older boy:

“Well?”

“Fine.”

“Wonderful. You will resume the regimen tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes, whatever you—whatever you want. Just leave me, now.”

And with that, the older boy’s mouth melts into a slow, bending smile.

“Splendid.”

And the younger boy, through teeth still gritted together:

“Quite.”

-

When John wakes, his hand is not on Sherlock’s hip. That’s the first thing he knows, and then, shifting, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, he thinks for a moment that Sherlock is gone, which is strangely not terrifying. It actually makes a curious sort of sense, feels almost reassuring. Sherlock wouldn’t be the type for a morning cuddle anyway—sad, that, but John will make do. He’s probably off doing research for the case. His old self, then. Everything is fine. Then John shifts awake a little more and realizes that Sherlock is still there, just far away, sitting on the very edge of the bed, naked, sheet around his waist, shoulders hunched, fingers steepled, looking at the wall, or at nothing.

“Sherlock?”

He’s not too alarmed, not yet, at least not consciously, though dread, in its own way, stitches itself into the fabric of his stomach without his knowing. What was he expecting anyway, he reasons with himself—that he found the hound overnight? Or pulled together breakfast in bed? Wanted a kiss, a snuggle, before John so much as brushed his teeth? Or ever, for that matter? Please. This is Sherlock Holmes, can you imagine? Still, he is—so stiff, so very very stiff. Like he’s been sitting there for hours.

“Are you alright?”

Silence, for a long time. Sherlock doesn’t look at him. Then, just as John is really sitting up, just as he’s about to ask again—

“That was,” says Sherlock. “An error.”

—and the morning softness of his skin gives way to a slow, incredulous greying.

“What do you mean?”

“For the love of god, John, don’t pretend to be any stupider than you already are. You know what I mean.”

John swallows.

“Okay, I.” Another swallow. “Okay.”

Sherlock turns his face, and he is looking at the window; the light slants through the curtain, cuts across one of his eyes, down his cheek.

“We must never…it must never happen again. Not once. Not ever.”

“Sherlock,” says John.

“Ever, John.”

And maybe he imagines it, or maybe it’s just the morning light, the slant of it cutting Sherlock’s expression into pieces, but John thinks he sees in the meant-to-be-granite resolve of his mouth, in the set of it, in his teeth pressed together, in the firmness of his hands and shoulders, in all of that John thinks he sees a certain crystalline texture, a prismatic almost trembling, terribly and sweetly fragile. He thinks he sees it, and maybe he’s imagining it, maybe it’s the light, but it pushes him forwards; it sets off, in the recesses of his chest, a tiny tragic shatter of hope.

“We don’t have to, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted—”

“Shut up.”

“No, I mean it, I’m not here for…for that, for  _sex_ , or for anything, god, Sherlock, I’m here for—oh, hell.” He swallows. “Look, Sherlock, it’s like I said, right? I don’t expect…I know you, I mean…we can just—”

“Shut  _up_.”

He is so rigid, so rigid and faraway, on the edge of the bed. John almost lifts his hand to reach out and he wonders if Sherlock can sense it, the aborted impulse in his muscles, even though he never moved. He thinks he must. He thinks he must.

“But Sherlock, I wouldn’t—”

“I said  _no_ , John!”

When Sherlock speaks again, it is quieter, but no less terrible.

“Alone is what I have,” he says. His voice is empty. “Alone protects me.”

His voice is empty. He is empty.

Blank.

He is blank.

And not long after, he is gone.

-

The fall is—pale.

John eats.

He sleeps.

He does not buy groceries. He does not cook.

He goes back to his therapist, who looks at his skin, and he thinks he sees in the pressing together of her lips a certain terminality.

Still, he eats.

He sleeps.

He does not buy groceries. He does not cook.

He sits in the armchair across from the other armchair, surrounded by walls and a smile that is yellow, surrounded by the bullet holes irrevocably embedded in that smile, in its yellowness, and he thinks that he should move out; but still he sits, and stares out the window, and listens, and listens, and listens—to absence, to the non-strains of the violin.

-

Time goes by. As it does. And then it is a day, a day like any other day; just one of many. John is coming home from the surgery. He works there more and more, these days. Has to pay the bills somehow. He hates it, of course. But it might be a little better than nothing. Might. He hasn’t decided yet, honestly. When he does, well. He thinks he’ll feel a little better, then.

John is coming home from the surgery, thinking about what to order for dinner, and he walks up the stairs to 221B, and he fits the key in the lock, and he walks inside and it isn’t until he hangs his jacket in the hall and drops his bag in the living room and turns and his gaze travels, accidentally, over the doorway to the kitchen, that he realizes he’s there.

He’s there. He’s there.

And John knows, intuitively, that it is not a hallucination, it is not a ghost, it is not any of those many many soft grey dreams he half-hoped half-dreaded to one day stop having.

No. He’s really there.

For a moment John is completely still. Then he draws back and lands his fist in the concave of Sherlock Holmes’ cheek, feels the breath escape and the body bend, thinks for a moment how pleasant, to have even this small part of him be enveloped in Sherlock’s skin and bones, how right, and then the anger leaves him all at once, so expansively and absolutely that John knows it’s over, feels the crimson implode across his skin and then vanish, forever. Clean.

His knees crumple.

Sherlock grabs him by the shoulders, holds him up, and John doesn’t push him away. He simply feels the pressure of his fingertips, faint through the fabric of his coat and yet world narrowing, or consuming, maybe; they are a minute immensity, everything. Sherlock is still reeling from the punch, but he won’t let John go. Only when John can stand again, somewhat steady though not entirely, never entirely, does Sherlock drops his hands, and then he does not touch him again, though he stays very close.

“John,” he says, and the force of the punch is gone from his voice, and the universe of tenderness in that tiny syllable snaps in two something that John had built up within himself ever since he fired that bullet and watched his skin rust over.

“I loved you,” he cries. “And even now, I—god. I love you.”

“I know.”

John laughs.

“I know. That you know. You know everything.”

“Not  _everything,_ John.”

“No.” John hiccups, wetly. “I guess not.”

“I do—care about you, John. You must know that.”

And John does. He does know that.

He braces himself.

“But…” Sherlock shuts his eyes, opens them again. “I’ve stopped myself from feeling things before. For my work. For my—mind.”

His mind. Of course. That love above all loves.

“I,” John says. “Well, yes, you’re right. I did know that. You didn’t have to tell me. It’s not as if I’d hoped…”

“John,” says Sherlock. “It  _is_  a distraction.”

“Right,” says John. “Right. I know. In that case, if you’d just…or I’ll just, we’ll just—Christ. Look, it’s alright. It doesn’t have to be…a big deal. It’s fine, really. Just. It’ll be fine.”

And he starts to turn away, thinking about Sherlock colorless again, and himself in blue, and how blueness is better than paleness but still. Still. Himself, in blue.

“Um, can I, um.” He screws his eyes shut. “Would you like me to move out? I was thinking…thinking about getting a new flat anyway. You know. Before. I could still come on cases and all that. But if it would be easier for you, it really wouldn’t be too much trouble. That is. I can just—”

“John,” says Sherlock. “Stop.”

And because John will do anything Sherlock asks—and because he also cannot ignore the feel of Sherlock’s unuttered  _please_ , the ghost of it pressing against his skin, and he can’t help it, hope against hope hurts in his chest—he stops. Sherlock looks at him. Looks away.  
  
“It is a distraction from a certain way of knowing things, that is. But John. I spent three years without you, and I may…something, rather…it’s occurred to me, and I am—well.”

And he pauses, and John’s hope (the shape of sparks, yellow, skittering across his fingertips) catches on that tiny miracle: Sherlock Holmes, pausing. And then, Sherlock Holmes, coming alive, so alive with color he seems wreathed in it, black purple grief and orange yellow joy and red, red, pain and anger, and everything else imaginable and all of it impossibly intense and yet in every bit, in every single color, at the same time there is that lithe and lovely blue, the one John’s only read about in sonnets and seen in special effects, but never really, never really—except, of course, on his very own skin.

Sherlock Holmes, in blue.

And Sherlock Holmes, whispering:

“That is not the way I want to know things anymore.”

-

Later—and now, they are in a place again where the days and weeks and months blur, and the only units that John can think of to describe time are things like sometime, before, after, later, ambiguous and smooth in their hands, and it is wonderful—Mycroft comes by.  
They’ve just had dinner. Takeaway: Sherlock picked at John’s curry noodles while his pineapple fried rice grew cold, and John pretended to get mad but didn’t care at all—used to it, so used to so many things by now, and that is wonderful too, the luxury of familiarity. Sherlock is standing by the window, staring absently outside. The door clicks, and John looks up from his blog, watches as a tongue of irritation flares over the back of Sherlock’s neck, in tune with the sound of his brother’s footsteps. It’s beautiful. It always is.

Mycroft stands in the foyer, stiller than John has ever seen him, and leans on his umbrella.

“So,” he says.

And Sherlock turns from the window and meets his gaze, and John realizes that, for the first time ever—in their entire lives, he imagines—Mycroft looks like he might not know, exactly, what’s about to happen next.

“A word?” says Sherlock.

“I had hoped,” murmured Mycroft.

“John,” says Sherlock, and some things never change: John rolls his eyes, but he saves a draft of his next blog post, folds up his laptop, and retreats upstairs, leaving the older and younger boy to whatever it is they have to say to one another.

It’s very late when Mycroft leaves; John hears the click of the door, and then the sound of Sherlock’s footsteps, one by one up the stairs. He’s finished his blog post already and is curled up in their bed reading a mystery. He listens as Sherlock’s footsteps stop. He can imagine the way he pauses outside the door, and wishes with one fervent ache that he wouldn’t hesitate ever again. Still, John waits for him, knowing, now, that he will come. A heartbeat later the door opens. Sherlock steps inside, and—wise man, or at least a little wiser than he was before—sets down the two cups of tea he brought with him on the nightstand. Then, he sits at the end of the bed, his back to John, only a slice of his profile visible, the slender shapes of it turned more tenderly square by the lamplight. John looks up from his book.

“Thank you for the tea,” he says.

“Those stories are insipid,” replies Sherlock.

John smiles and dog-ears the page, though he does not yet close the book; he’s not sure, yet, what Sherlock will want next, and he doesn’t want to suggest that he has any sort of expectation.

“He wanted to apologize,” says Sherlock.

Now John closes the book, leans over to put it on the bedside table, and takes his cup of tea and sips it once, twice, before he puts it down again.

“Mycroft? Apologize?”

The shadow of a smile touches Sherlock’s cheek.

“Hard to believe, I know.”

John wants to ask what Mycroft apologized for, but he waits, knowing that Sherlock will tell him if he wants to tell him, that pushing him to talk will only unsettle the delicate balance of sincerity suspended between them. For a moment, Sherlock is still, sitting on the edge of the bed, and then he turns and meets John’s eyes for a split second. A violet shiver of need cuts across his cheek and somehow communicates itself directly to John, jutting deep into him. Then Sherlock is clambering across the mattress, kicking up the covers and crawling underneath. John shifts, lets himself be moved and molded until Sherlock is fitted against his side, not in his arms, exactly, but pressed up against him, the lines of their bodies perfectly parallel except for the meeting point of their ankles beneath the sheets.

John makes a soft sound in the back of his throat, and Sherlock leans his head onto his shoulder, reaches down and tangles their fingers together; the urgent lightness on his cheeks deepens fast into that steady, resilient blue. John buries his nose in his hair. For a moment, Sherlock is still. Then:

“It was the first time my brother ever admitted to having made a mistake. In front of me, at the very least. I suspect, however, it was also the first time he had admitted such a thing ever in his life.”

Sherlock pauses.

“He said he was sorry for…misapprehending me.”

“How so?” asks John, though he has an idea.

“The colors.”

“Ah.”

Again, John waits. Sherlock absently runs his thumb over John’s knuckles as he pulls at his own lower lip, a new habit, something he does when he’s far away from himself, adrift in thought, emotion, memory. It’s soft and rhythmic, and John is nearly lulled, lost in it, when he speaks again.

“You already know, of course, that I have trouble, sometimes. Holding it all in.”

John nods, thinking of the episodes he still has, where his skin flares so bright that he can’t see or think, can barely breathe, and he has to turn away from the world—on a case, tucking himself into phone booths or alleyways, at home, turning his face into the back of the sofa or locking himself in their room, lights off blinds shuttered. The sort of viscerality behind the sickness, the pure, vicious experience of it, is a constant in his life, at once a reality more real than any other and completely untenable; it makes Sherlock who he is, and it is almost always unspeakably beautiful, so ferociously alive, and John loves it, loves it infinitely, needs it. Still, the moments where it's too much, where it overflows even Sherlock's capacities—these moments are agony, utterly. They are all the more excruciating because there is so little to be done; John can shelter Sherlock on the street, can type softly for him to hear in the living room, can massage his temples in their bedroom, but he can't make it stop, not entirely. John hates feeling helpless; it goes against all of his instincts as a doctor, and as a person who loves.

And he loves Sherlock, loves him loves him loves him.

“I know,” he murmurs.

“You make it bearable, you know,” says Sherlock, in a rare flash of intuition; he knows how much it troubles John. He swallows, still shy, at times, of certain displays of feelings, and continues abruptly. “In any case. When I was a child, the colors made me sick, very sick. I felt so strongly. It was like a rash at first. Later, I vomited them. Mycroft tried to help me, but he was…misguided. Taught me a technique to suppress them, the kind of thing that was developed decades ago to deal with patients in sanitariums. It was not… humane. But it was all he knew.”

John tries to keep his voice steady, to ignore the horror twisting his gut; he knows that it creeps across his body anyway, an ugly green on his wrists. Still, there is something vital in the attempt to cover up.

“How was it?”

Sherlock shrugs, eyes distant, nowhere close to John and yet, John has finally come to understand, in many ways as close to him as possible.

“ _Dull._  I tried to do as he suggested, I really did. Ever since I was a little boy. But it was so boring, the world was flat, no texture to it, nothing. Every time, I either turned back to my colors, which nearly killed me, or…well, when I got older, to heroin or cocaine, which ultimately had the same effect.”

“What finally…?”

“Made it possible for me? The Work, John. Obviously. It wasn’t the same, of course. But it was…enough. Barely enough. But enough. And then…well.”

Sherlock glances at him, then looks away quickly, his lower lip disappearing beneath his teeth as a shy spray of pink softens the edges of his neck and jaw.

“There was you, too, I suppose.”

John can’t just sit there, he has to speak, has to do something, terrified that otherwise his skin will rupture at the seams in a bright singing excess of emotion even though he knows of course, that such a thing is impossible. For most, at least.

“And Mycroft? Is he…”

“Mycroft is the same as I, actually. As you speculated long ago—yes, I know. Really, John, of course I know. Anyway, our condition is, in fact, genetic. But he was always better at controlling them than I was. Still is. He doesn’t like them, you see, which makes it easier for him to turn them on and off. But as for me, well. As much as I hurt, I always sort of…loved it. And so if I knew it was even a possibility, for me to feel that much…even, even just sometimes, well. I would break. So it became rather…all or nothing, I’d say.”

John swallows, thickly.

“And when I met you, it was nothing.”

“Exactly. Well. That, and nicotine.”

“What changed?”

“I just…” Sherlock pauses. “Well, to be honest, I don’t really know. Not for sure. But I think I sort of, rather…after the Fall, after all that time I spent away from you, John. I just. I found that it was impossible.”

“Impossible?”

Sherlock looks at their twined hands and squeezes, once, very gently; then, he meets John’s eyes, and the shimmering texture of his gaze bears down, all the more alive and real for its unsteadiness.

“To be afraid anymore, I mean. Of feeling too much.”

John has to kiss him then, tangling his fingers in his hair and sighing in relief as Sherlock kisses back, parts his lips and tries to say John’s name once, softly, before letting himself be pressed back against the pillows. They lie there for a long time, kissing and running their hands over each other and breaking away to breathe against each other’s skin which lives with color. Eventually they tire, and it’s John’s turn to lean his head on Sherlock’s shoulder, smiling as the thick cords of blue swirl up their arms and disappear beneath their shirtsleeves again and again, as Sherlock reaches for his hand and inhales once, deeply, exhaling in a way that is very, very full. John closes his eyes, and they sit in silence together for a measureless time.

“I  _have_  always wondered, though,” says Sherlock eventually, because he is Sherlock, and he hasn’t changed, not fundamentally, he’s just a little brighter, and therefore he must wonder, always, and John loves him, loves him. “The excess color, that used to make me so sick. When I feel something now, where does it go?”

John opens his eyes and gazes, from the point where their hands meet and their wrists wind up and away from each other, at the blue of Sherlock’s skin, mirrored onto his.

“I think I might have some idea.”

Sherlock frowns.

“You aren’t serious.”

John nods, and then he feels Sherlock's baritone chuckle radiate through him.

“You know that's impossible to measure. It defies scientific means. You can’t know for sure. You simply can’t.”

John leans up, pressing their foreheads together, and when he smiles, Sherlock is already smiling back.

“No, you’re right.” John speaks softly, slowly, shaping the spaces between each word into expansive, atomically intimate silences in which he knows their lives can stretch, infinitely separate and yet wound inexorably together. He knows it deeply, wildly and fantastically and utterly, utterly irrationally, such that it is the surest sort of knowing he has ever done. “I suppose we can’t.”

Then he kisses him, and Sherlock kisses back, and it’s true—he can’t know, not really, not from looking, or in fact in any other way, and neither can Sherlock.

That’s alright. They don’t have to.

**Author's Note:**

> i’m back here after FIVE years LITERALLY FIVE YEARS because this summer i was living abroad largely without internet and the only hard copy of a fanfiction i own is johnlock. yeah, i own a goddamn print copy. go fucking figure. so i got inspired, and i've been writing this fic since august, with huge breaks to deal with school, and what do you know, coincidentally i finish it right as series 4 is airing. go. fucking. figure. 
> 
> kinda wanna hit y'all with a femininst analysis (FUCK you, steven moffat, this is not me being cute, truly and sincerely fuck you) of my own piece but i will resist...would love to talk if people have thoughts! 
> 
> anyway, apologies for my egregious use of em dashes. i am a Monster.
> 
> also, feel free to check me out at worldaccordingwrites dot tumblr dot com as well :)
> 
> again & as always, thanks so much for reading!
> 
> references:  
> death by starvation: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-a-person-sur/  
> list of famous fictional & historical suicides: mostly from my head, a little help from wikipedia  
> physiological signs of anger: http://gracepointwellness.org/116-anger-management/article/5812-recognizing-anger-signs


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